Welcome to the second part of this blog about Slideshare. I will be finishing off looking at the benefits of marketing with slideshare by taking a brief look at SEO followed by some helpful ideas to get you started on Slideshare.<

SEO

With a PageRank, a Google algorithm that measures the importance and relevance of links on a site, of eight out of ten, Slideshare has high credibility when it comes to SEO. This means uploading your content on Slideshare will give it an SEO boost and may even lead to better search results.
When you upload content with text, Slideshare automatically scrapes the content in order to optimise it for search results, you can also add tags that act as keywords for people to find your content.

Helpful ideas to get you started

I have been testing Slideshare for a while now and have come across a few ideas that might help you kick-start your Slideshare experience:

• Create a branded page – there are different levels of branded page depending on what pricing option you go for, but even at the lowest price it is worth adding a logo and a few details about your company that show up on your page.
• Promote your Slideshare – A lot of people use Slideshare but do not promote their account. There are Slideshare badges and widgets available to add to your website, encouraging people to view your content.
• Content, content, content – Uploading great content consistently and interacting with other content improves your visibility on the site, increasing the chances of your content being seen by others.
• Brand your content – Add your logo to the content you are uploading so viewers know who has created it and know where to go to find more.
• Build up a network – Like all social platforms, building up a network is important. By interacting with other content, liking and sharing, and following other users you are likely to increase your followers. If your followers have their email notifications switched on they will receive emails each time you upload new content.
• Different types of content – Upload different types of content. Slideshare was originally designed for powerpoint presentations but now it is used for all different forms of content.
• Videos – Videos can be very influential on Slideshare. For example, if you upload a 90 second talking head video on both YouTube and Slideshare, it can gain up to 10 times more views on Slideshare. This is because people don’t come to Slideshare to look at videos of cute cats – they come to find information. There are also far less videos on Slideshare so they are more likely to be seen.

I hope this two part blog has given you some insight in to the benefits of utilising Slideshare to extend the reach of your content. If you missed the first part of this blog you can find it here ‘Marketing with Slideshare (Part One)’.

Have you got any content on Slideshare? Have you been getting the results you expected? Or do you want some more help and ideas? Get in contact and let us know!

This is the first of a two part blog looking at Slideshare as a way to extend the reach of your content. In this blog there will be a brief introduction to Slideshare with a more detailed look at Slideshare as a business platform and the valuable analytics available. The second part of this blog, released tomorrow, will look at the benefits Slideshare can offer to your SEO efforts and some helpful ideas to get you started.

One of the biggest and yet underused online business platforms that I’ve been testing recently is Slideshare. For those that haven’t heard of it, Slideshare is a platform for sharing business content; you can share almost any type of content e.g. powerpoint, word documents, pdf, infographics, video, webcasts.

There’s been a lot more talk on marketing blogs about it in the past few months and with good reason; Slideshare has a massive amount of traffic, they get 60 million unique visits a month, one of the highest traffic sites on the internet! This potential exposure alone is enough of a reason to start uploading your content to Slideshare.

Business platform

Another reason to start pushing Slideshare to clients is because it is made for businesses. Proof of this is easy to see. Slideshare enables you to add tags to the content you upload and the six most used tags are: business, statistics, social media, market, trends and research.

One of the main ROI indicators in B2B marketing is leads, and capturing this data is generally not possible with Facebook and Twitter. This is where Slideshare differs; it allows you to capture leads by adding a data capture form to your content. “That’s great, now I can capture those all-important leads!” I hear you say, but it gets better. The flexibility in the data capture form makes it so simple for the viewer and so flexible for the content owner:

• You decide where in your content it sits, be it before the reader gets to view your content, half way through the content and perhaps just before they get to that great bit of knowledge you are sharing, or at the end.
• You can choose the information that you ask for and if the form is mandatory or optional.
• You can use the data capture as a call-to-action, for example to drive traffic to your website to sign up for a newsletter.
• The form auto-populates if the viewer is signed in to Slideshare.
• The form still appears on embedded Slideshare presentations.

Analytics

Slideshare also offers analytics on the content you upload. If you sign up to the very reasonably priced, £19 per month Silver Account, you gain access to in-depth analytics on your content. Including:

• Date viewed
• Geographic location of viewer
• What content they viewed
• The referring url they used to get to your content
• Keywords used to find your content
• What content was being viewed when they clicked through to your presentation

The analytics that are provided can give you good insight in to what content resonates best with your audience. This insight will help when you are creating future content as you will know which type, style and information your audience interacts with most.

I will stop at this point and let you digest the great potential of Slideshare. See tomorrow’s blog for more on Slideshare including some helpful tips to get you off to a flying start on your own Slideshare experience.

This week marked the official start of the Government’s reforms of the NHS in England with GP-led commissioning groups taking control of a large chunk of the NHS budget and the newly formed NHS England board in charge of the day-to-day running of services.

These changes have taken nearly three years to come into play following the initial publication of the reform plans back in the summer of 2010. But what do the changes actually mean?
From 1st April, under the Health and Social Care Act 2012, the NHS has moved to a Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) model instead of using primary care trusts. From now on, CCGs, which are groups of GPs, will be responsible for designing and commissioning healthcare locally. They have gone through an authorisation process run by the new NHS Commissioning Board with 212 CCGs being approved to take on their new commisssioning duties this week. See where they are on the latest map from NHS England.

Strategic Health Authorities and Primary Care Trusts have now been replaced under this new model and the aim of clinical commissioning is to improve patient care, with a focus on prevention as well as healthcare.

The Health and Social Care Act 2012 certainly signifies one of the biggest changes to the NHS so far, however, it has survived many reforms in the past 65 years. Since its inception in 1948, people are living longer and more people are surviving illnesses such as cancer and heart disease.

The changes to the structure in the NHS will make themselves felt gradually and will not only impact on those working in the organisation, but also on anyone supplying products and services into the NHS.

Where next?

Visit our healthcare section to see how we can help you to market to the ever-changing NHS.

A synthetic version of the foot and mouth virus has been produced, as published in PLOS yesterday. This replica still consists of the external shell, triggering the immune system for antibody production, but the vital difference is the lack of the infection-causing genetic material.

So what’s the significance of this? For a start, the production of inactivated virus vaccines currently require expensive high containment facilities. No matter how tight the biosecurity, dealing with live viral particles still incurs potential risk to the public (have you ever read The Hot Zone?). Without the genetic material, the virus is rendered harmless, allowing vaccine manufacture to be performed under standard laboratory conditions.

Interestingly, the stability of these synthetic virus particles has also been improved, yielding another significant benefit. International vaccination programmes have always come up against the hurdle of requiring cold storage facilities. How do you supply the inhabitants of the remotest village in the middle of the African desert when the vaccine might have to endure weeks of travelling in +30°C heat? This new synthetic virus has been found to retain stability at high temperatures, even at 56°C for at least two hours.

Transferring the cost savings of production and distribution to the eventual cost of the vaccine itself is likely to have a real positive impact on vaccination programmes throughout the more economically deprived regions of the world. The researchers are already hard at work on a similar approach for the Polio virus.

Want to know more?

Click here to view BBC News interactive video discussing synthetic viruses

A few months ago I started experimenting with an Augmented Reality (AR) smart phone app called Aurasma

Augmented Reality is “a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data.” – Wikipedia

At the time there were a few big brands taking advantage of AR but since then it has taken off with whole catalogues and magazines, IKEA and GQ, being AR enabled and with the recent release of Google Glasses it looks as though this technology is only going to get bigger. The technology is a prominent feature at all the digital marketing exhibitions with many stands showing off some form of AR. There are now exhibitions solely dedicated to AR technology.

There are two major challenges facing AR :

•  There are many different apps available that allow you to view AR that has been developed by their app but there is no ‘killer app’ that has been downloaded en masse.
•  3-D content is difficult, expensive and time consuming to create. For AR to flourish there needs to be an app that allows easy creation and exportation of 3-D.

However if there was ever a year that might prove to make or break AR it is 2013, here are some reasons why:

 Go go gadget glasses

Google Glasses will be released in 2013 and, despite some negative press about the aesthetics, have the tech world in a buzz. There has also been development in AR glasses for industrial uses and even AR contact lenses! There have also been patent applications from Microsoft and Apple looking into wearable AR devices.

Smartphones

The newest ranges of smartphones have AR integrate optimized augmented reality, visual display and camera performance integrated in to them. This allows for AR integrated games and apps.

GPS

There have been apps that show you information about your current location on the market for some time now. The next generation of GPS apps are likely to be released in 2013, using AR to further enhance your interactivity with your surroundings. Companies such Hover are creating and augmenting 3-D maps of urban areas, and Metaio has developed “snapping algorithms” that pull this kind of data from the cloud and tightly align it to the real world.

In 2012 Augmented Reality seemed like a novelty that would never catch on, this was also said about QR codes and now you can find them wherever you look.

I strongly believe that AR is something that you need to keep one eye on and look for opportunities to take advantage of its nearly endless uses.

Everyone at Alto pulled out all the stops last week for a two-day Comic Relief Bake Off to raise money as part of this year’s Red Nose Day fundraising campaign.

We all dug out our baking tins, dusted off the recipe books and with a little co-ordination ended up with 15 varieties of home made cakes over Thursday 14th and Friday 15th March.

Our delectable delights included an innovative banana and walnut loaf made in a bread-maker after an oven disaster, a variety of different flavour crispy nests complete with mini eggs to bring that Spring feel to the office, despite the weather, and a plate of red nose mini cupcakes which brought a smile to everyone!

We also survived a rubbery cream disaster to bounce back with a full range of fantastic cakes from coffee and walnut to bakewell tart and triple chocolate muffins. We ensured there was something for everyone and trailed around the Marina where we are based, selling cakes on trays like the old cinema usherettes selling the ice creams.

And it was worth the effort as Alto are now donating a grand total of £270 to Comic Relief, plus an extra £10 that was donated online by one of our media partners who phoned in mid cake sale and made the payment for a virtual cake!

Well done to all concerned!

All our delicious cakes have been eaten but you can still donate to Comic Relief.

Sharing is caring

Read more about all of the charitable causes which we support through the year.

On the 13th of November an intrigued Dr Isabel Goodhand of the Alto Marketing team, latched onto a recently published paper from researchers at Harvard’s Wyss institute

The paper described the Lung-on-a-Chip concept – human cells lining a micro-device to imitate the conditions within the human lung. They used the device to study lung toxicity (pulmonary oedema) resulting from an anti-cancer treatment, and revealed that the mechanical actions of breathing increased membrane permeability and worsened lung toxicity. Researchers then went on to use the Lung-on-a-Chip to discover new therapeutic compounds to alleviate this side-effect, a technique which could revolutionise direct drug development.

Understandably we weren’t the only ones to get excited about this novel approach. The UK’s National Centre of the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3RS) has just awarded its 3Rs Prize to Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber M.D, Ph.D for his pioneering Lung-on-a-Chip. Receiving this prize will validate and help raise global awareness for this new technology, in the pursuit of alternative approaches to animal testing.

Want to know more?

Read Isy’s original blog ‘Lung-on-a-chip: a breath of fresh air in disease modelling’